More animals and listening
In the wake of
my
posting Judith Barrington's poem "Crows", I've been pointed to more
things about listening to animals and animals listening to us -- crows,
lions, chimpanzees, and of course dogs.
Jeremy Hawker, crow-surrounded in Norway, reminds me of Ted Hughes's
fierce book
Crow ("From the
Life and Songs of the Crow"), where we find
Crow Goes Hunting
Crow
Decided to try words.
He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack--
Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained,
With strong teeth.
You could not find a better bred lot.
He pointed out the hare and away went the words
Resounding.
Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare?
It converted itself to a concrete bunker.
The words circled protesting, resounding.
Crow turned the words into bombs--they blasted the bunker.
The bits of bunker flew up--a flock of starlings.
Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the
starlings.
The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst.
Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water.
The water turned into an earthquake, swallowing the
reservoir.
The earthquake turned into a hare and leaped for the hill
Having eaten Crow's words.
Crow gazed after the bounding hare
Speechless with admiration.
Turning from crows to lions (and Wittgenstein), Hawker quotes from John
Gray's
Straw Dogs, which
attacks the belief that humans are different from and superior to
animals:
'If a lion could talk, we could not
understand him,' the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said.
'It's clear that Wittgenstein hadn't spent much time with lions,'
commented the gambler and conservationist John Aspinall.
So, mixed opinions on lions. What of chimpanzees, gorillas, and
their kin, whose linguistic abilities have been scrutinized for forty
years or so now? In 1978 (at the 14th regional meeting of the
Chicago Linguistic Society) Mark Seidenberg and Laura Petitto posed the
provocative question, "What Do Signing Chimpanzees Have to Say to
Linguists?" (a longer article appeared in
Cognition the following year, under
the title "Signing behavior in apes: A critical review").
Actually, this is two questions, one about what linguists can
learn from observing signing chimpanzees (which is what the article
mostly concerns itself with), and one about what signing chimpanzees
"say" -- that is, sign -- to linguists and other observers.
Seidenberg and Petitto answer that question on p. 432 of the published
paper:
me
banana you banana you me me banana
and similar "long, repetitive, continuous sequences" about matters of
intense interest to the chimpanzees.
Ok, it's been fun chatting with the chimpanzees, but let's spend some
time with those loving, loyal dogs. (Though dogs get a lot more
press than cats in the communication-with-humans department,
googling on "talking cat" will net you a lot of entertaining stuff;
still, "talking dog" gets more than ten times the hits.) Surely,
the last word on dogs'
UNDERSTANDING of human language
comes (as Ray Girvan reminds me) from Gary Larson, in his
Far Side cartoon on the subject:
What we say to dogs: Okay,
Ginger! I've had it! You stay out of the garbage!
Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage, or else!
What they hear: blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah...
[So it turns out Girvan had a different Larson cartoon in mind -- one in which Professor Milton invents a device that translates from Dog to English, and goes down a street full of barking dogs, only to discover that they are all saying "Hey hey hey hey hey hey..."]
Larson is dubious, but Dan Piraro, in a recent Bizarro cartoon
(5/30/06), thinks some dogs can do a lot better, and can tell us about
it. In this cartoon, a sizable dog confronts a young man sitting
on a couch. The dog has his front paws on the couch, and the man
is shrinking back in some alarm. The dog complains:
Wanna watch some TV? Do ya,
boy? Do ya? Wanna watch some TV? Huh, boy?
Do you see how PATRONIZING that is?!
A nice counterpart to the chimps' long repetitive sequences of signs.
And now I think I'll go off the Language Log Plaza Talking Animal Watch
for a while. I've seen too many cats saying "Mama!" And Bill Poser
has reported to us on the potentially dire consequences of listening to cats.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 4, 2006 12:10 PM